It was easy enough for Hresh to enter into conversations with those he met in Vengiboneeza, even sea-lords, even humans. Everyone understood him and everyone was unfailingly courteous. But gradually he came to understand that these were not real conversations. They were polite illusions engendered by the machine that was his gateway to the past. He was not actually there in the Great World that had died seven hundred thousand years before under the onslaught of the death-stars, but was, rather, enmeshed in some projection, some facsimile, which had all the semblance of life and which drew him into itself as though he were an actual wayfarer in that huge city.

This became apparent because he went among its inhabitants full of questions, as usual. But somehow the answers that he received had no substance. They appeared to hold meaning, but it would slip away into nothingness even as it entered his mind, like the food one enjoys in the banquets of dreams. He could not learn anything by questioning those whom he encountered on the streets of lost Vengiboneeza. It was truly lost, and cut off from him by the terrible barrier of time.

Still, what he saw dazzled and enriched him, and filled him with awe for the splendor of what had been.

The sapphire-eyes seemed to appear and disappear in old Vengiboneeza as they pleased, winking in and out of being with astonishing ease. Pop and they were here, pop and they were gone again.

For travel outside the city they had another wondrous thing, sky-chariots like shimmering pink-and-gold bubbles that came floating down without a sound and released their passengers from hatches opening magically in their sides. Hresh saw hundreds of these bubbles overhead, moving silently and swiftly. They never collided, though they often seemed to come close. Within them sat sapphire-eyes, in positions of ease.

A third means of travel — if indeed travel was what it was — was available at enigmatic devices mounted on small platforms of sleek green stone. These were narrow vertical tubes of dark metal, about as tall as a full-grown man, widening at their upper ends into hooded open-faced spheres no larger than a man’s head. A strange fierce light, blue and red and green, played about the openings of these spheres as though emanating from some powerful apparatus within.

From time to time a sapphire-eyes, moving even more sedately and calmly than usual, would approach one of the platforms on which these tubes were stationed. Generally others of its kind would accompany it, walking close alongside, sometimes letting their little forearms rest against its heavy body. But always these companions would move away, allowing the departing sapphire-eyes to ascend the platform alone. It would draw near the sphere atop the tube until its great-jawed face was shining with the light that came from it; and then it would suddenly be drawn inside. Hresh could not see how that was accomplished, nor how there might be room for the immense bulk of a sapphire-eyes within that small glowing sphere. Never could he detect the moment when the transition was made, when the sapphire-eyes that stood peering into the sphere was swept from sight.

Whatever voyage the sapphire-eyes had undertaken was evidently a one-way journey: many went into the spheres atop the tubes, but Hresh never saw anyone emerge.

It appeared that none of these devices had survived into the modern-day Vengiboneeza. Hresh saw them only in his visions. In the real ruined Vengiboneeza he was unable even to find traces of the green stone platforms on which the tubes had been mounted.

After observing the rite of the hooded sphere many times, Hresh finally resolved to approach one of them himself. His dreaming spirit entered a deserted plaza on a moonless night. A tree stood nearby, its branches bowed down under the weight of enormous wedge-shaped brown nuts, each one bigger across than the span of his two hands. He made a heap of these, piling them high enough so that he could see into the sphere’s opening. It was a difficult business. The nuts, packed edge to edge, kept slipping and sliding beneath him, and he had to grip the hood of the sphere to keep from falling. Holding tight, he put his head close to the opening.

He knew there was danger in this. He might be drawn in and swept away — where? To another world? To the home of the gods? Or he might be destroyed altogether, for he had begun to suspect that the sapphire-eyes used these devices to end their lives, when their death-day finally had come. But the temptation to look within one was irresistible. And he told himself that this was only a vision. How could he be harmed by a device that had no real existence, that had ceased to exist at least seven hundred thousand years before he was born?

But if you are not really here, a voice within him said, then how is it you were able to pull those nuts from the tree and pile them up like this?

Hresh brushed the question aside and looked within.

There was a strange thing at the heart of the hooded sphere: a zone of utter darkness, so black that it gave off a kind of light beyond light. He stared at it, dazzled, and knew that he was looking not merely into another world but into some other universe, something outside the domain of the gods entirely. Though the black zone was very small — he supposed that he could enclose it in the palm of one hand — there was a great power to it. They have captured little pieces of that other universe, he imagined, and installed them in these round metal containers; and when they wish to leave the realm of the gods they approach one of the containers and the blackness scoops them up and carries them off.

He waited calmly for it to carry him off. The spell of the thing held him completely. Let it take him where it would.

But it took him nowhere. He stared at it until his eyes hurt; and then two figures appeared out of the shadows, a sapphire-eyes and a vegetal, and beckoned to him.

“Come away from there,” the vegetal said, in its whispering, rustling way. “There’s danger there, little one.”

“Danger? Where? I can put my head right in it, and nothing happens.”

“Come away, all the same.”

“I will, if you’ll explain to me what this is.”

The vegetal folded its petals; the sapphire-eyes laughed its hissing laugh. Then they explained the device to him, both of them speaking at once, and he understood perfectly what they said, at least so long as they were speaking. What they told him left him rapt with wonder; but it was like everything else he heard while visiting the Great World, no more nourishing than dream-food, and such meaning as it might have had in the first moment of its telling slipped away from him at once, hard as he struggled to hold to it.

He stepped down from the platform, and they led him away toward a place of lights and singing. The only thing he could remember afterward was something he had concluded for himself, and not anything they had told him. Which was that these were the devices that the people of the Great World employed to end their lives, when they knew that the time had come for them to die.

Why would they want to die? he asked himself. And had no answer.

Then he thought: they knew the death-stars were coming. And yet they stayed here, and let them come.

Why would they have done that?

And had no answer for that, either.

There was a place in the city of Hresh’s visions where the whole world stood portrayed against the sky. A flat metal disk of a bright silvery metal was mounted at an angle in the outer wall of a low ten-sided building; and when he touched a knob beside it a shaft of piercing brightness came down out of somewhere and struck it, and a huge globe of the world sprang into brilliant life before him. He knew at once that this was the world, because he had seen pictures of it in the chronicles. Those pictures were flat, and this was round, but he knew it was the world because that was how the chronicles said the world really was. Hresh had never imagined there would be so much of it. He could walk completely around the globe that represented it, and there were places on every side. He saw four great landmasses, separated by vast seas. Vast sprawling cities were shown, laced with highways like rivers of light, and lakes and rivers, and mountains and plains. Even though this was only an image in the air, Hresh could feel the surging power of the mighty seas and the immense weight of the mountains, and when he looked at the representations of the cities he had the illusion that he saw tiny figures moving about on tiny streets.